The Embers of Heaven

by Alma Alexander

  Linh-an had changed… the Temple had changed. Amais had a sudden sense of the Great Temple, and all it had once stood for, teetering on the edge of a chasm, a balancing act between true faith and a shoring-up of at least a semblance of belief. Times were tight—while the Temple had traditionally been the place where the people had flocked for succor during their fallow years and bitter days, it had found its road much rockier since the fall of the old Empire and all it signified. It had been centuries since yearwoods had been universally used as Syai’s calendars and the bead carvers had found a home on the First Circle, with Cahan’s blessing on all the days that the beads they made would signify for those who came to buy them. The secular replaced the religious, and even those who wanted to keep the old ways had to carefully weigh the material costs against its spiritual benefits.

  Amais belatedly realized that she no real idea of what to do next. Purchase an offering? An offering for which deity—and what kind of offering? Was that still required in order to gain admittance into the inner sanctums of the Temple? Where was she to look for anyone at all who would know what to do with the ashes of a woman whose spirit had dwelt in these halls long before her body had failed her, half the world away? She vaguely recalled that there had been funeral brokers in the First Circle once, but they seemed to belong to a lost age of the Temple, to the days when funerals were elaborate and complicated ceremonies requiring the manufacture of paper effigies of whatever the deceased might need in the afterlife. And even those had dealt with the actual dead, with a body which was to be sent to Cahan with all of its paper-rendered treasures. Baya-Dan was already ashes, and Amais didn’t have any idea if the correct protocol had even been followed back in Elaas, in the small community of Syai four hundred years removed from its roots. What if the Temple refused to deal with her grandmother’s ashes at all?

  She looked around, almost furtively, not quite knowing what to expect but half bracing for armed guards should she break any Temple taboo—but nobody seemed to be paying her any attention. Sparing a final glance for those phantom Temple guards, Amais slipped quietly past the gate and into the Second Circle.

  There was a susurrus of sound around her, with kneeling supplicants, mostly older women but an incongruously large number of young men clad in some sort of military uniform, murmuring prayers at the stone statues that stood in their niches as they had done from time immemorial and gazed out over the heads of the worshippers with blind stone eyes. In some ways, the people were here to ask for the things that they had always asked for—the small miracles of everyday lives—and to give thanks for things that had gone right in increasingly complicated lives; Amais could glean words and phrases as she walked past the kneeling women: why is my husband so unhappy?…my child is getting married, her happiness… my baby is healthy now… I need a child… food, blessed spirit, we are hungry… But the young men in uniform had come here on a far more urgent errand, and had a single simpler prayer that Amais overheard over and over again as she walked past whispering petitioners on their knees below a deity wreathed in incense smoke. Let me survive. Let the storm pass over my head. Let the sword, the bullet, with my name on it not have been made yet.

  Amais knew that her business here was important, but all that the Temple had meant in her life was stronger than her—these walls of legend that now rose about her took her breath away. This was the Temple—she was in the Great Temple—people from the pages of Tai’s journals had walked these paving stones four centuries before. But there was more than just an echo of ghostly footsteps. There was a solid link here. A particular niche. A woman raised first to a position of status and influence and then to a place in the Later Heaven, by the power of jin-shei.

  Amais had never been here before, and for all the detail of their maps and descriptions and drawings her grandmother’s books were old and outdated and sometimes deliberately less than complete. Despite all that, despite even her inability to map the First Circle with the ancient vision she carried in her head, Amais’s feet now took her, with an uncannily sure instinct, around the perimeter of the Second Circle until she reached the niches of the Sages, and then to a particular niche on the wall where the Sages had been placed.

  The niche of a woman who had lived and laughed in the same bright days that Tai herself had been young. Nhia, Blessed Nhia, the Sage who had been jin-shei-bao to a poet, and an Empress.

  Somehow none of the supplicants crowding the Second Circle all gathered before the more popular niches with their constant and insistent murmur of prayer and invocation, had chosen to come to this part of the Circle on this day, and Amais found herself quite alone with the ancient Sages. Nhia’s niche had a single incense stick burning in a holder, a thin trail of scented blue smoke curling around the carved image within. Amais stood before it, aware that she was staring but unable to do anything about it. And then her legs gave way, as though all the weight of the occasion had descended on her shoulders at once, and she fell to her knees on the stone paving slabs, settling back onto her heels, her eyes following the coils of smoke as they rose towards the ceiling. The urn with her grandmother’s ashes had somehow ended up in front of her, between her and the niche.

  Her mind was both blank and awash with so many thoughts at once that it all just added up to white noise. And then something caught her eye, a movement in the corridor, and she turned her head marginally to look. Her eyes blurred with an unexpected film of tears, she could initially make out no more than an approaching shape of a feminine form, someone who walked with a limp, leaning on a cane.

  Leaning on a cane…

  Nhia. Nhia had been a cripple. And now a ghostly figure with a limp approached as Amais knelt before Nhia’s own shrine. A superstitious dread gripped Amais all of a sudden, and she scrambled to her feet, gathering up the urn with unseemly haste as she did so and almost spilling the contents.

  “Do you wish to make an offering?” the limping ‘ghost’ asked Amais in a pleasant low alto voice.

  Amais blinked, clearing her sight. It was no ghost—this was not Nhia. It was just a girl, perhaps only a few years older than Amais herself, garbed in Temple robes and leaning on a cane while favoring one bandaged foot.

  Amais glanced down at the urn she held and then back at the other girl, trying to gather her scattered thoughts together.

  “This is my grandmother,” she said incongruously. That bald fact seemed to be all that she could come up with. “I need… I need to bury her.”

  The girl who had spoken to Amais—and in fact she was little more than a girl, despite the oddly mature, dark voice—was dressed in a dark blue silk gown, and wore her long hair in a single simple braid down her back. There was little to identify her as belonging to the Temple but somehow she gave the impression of being an indelible part of the place, as though the Temple itself had grown a human avatar in order to address, without frightening it to death, the lost soul that had found its way to the sacred portals. She inclined her head at Amais’s words, without giving any indication that they had been startling or impolite in any way. Amais had an uncanny feeling that the acolyte’s next words would be something like, We have been expecting you.

  Instead, the other girl gave a slight bow. “I am Jinlien, of the Fourth Circle,” she said. “You can discuss funeral arrangements with me, if you wish.”

  But Amais stood rooted to the spot, staring up at Nhia’s shrine.

  “I thought you were her,” she whispered. “I thought you were a ghost…”

  For the first time the priestess, Jinlien, looked a little startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “She had a deformed foot,” Amais said softly, in the hypnotizing singsong voice that baya-Dan would have recognized, the storytelling voice. “The Blessed Nhia. She was born with a deformed foot, and she limped…”And then the voice broke, and Amais indicated the cane with a small helpless gesture. “And then, you came in…”

  “Yes,” Jinlien said, surprised, but with dawning understanding. “This? I twisted my
ankle falling down some stairs. The cane is temporary. I am sorry I startled you.”

  “I should make an offering,” Amais said, talking almost to herself. “A proper offering, something fitting, something that I would do in Tai’s name and my own…”

  “Tai? Who is Tai?”

  Amais turned wide eyes to her companion, almost ludicrously taken aback that she did not know this immediately, that everyone in Syai didn’t know this immediately. “Nhia… the Blessed Sage Nhia… was jin-shei-bao to Kito-Tai. The poet. I am her many times great-granddaughter…”

  Jinlien conquered her astonishment, inclined her head again. “Jin-shei,” she said. She tasted the word as though it was something rich and strange… but not wholly unfamiliar. As though a hidden hoard of some precious spice had been discovered many years after it had been laid down, and found to be still good. “It’s been a long time since an offering was made here in the name of jin-shei. If you have a mind to do a formal offering, I can tell you exactly what you would need. But in the meantime…” She fished in the folds of her robe, came up with two incense sticks, and offered both of them to Amais. “In the meantime, you can consider this a promise of what is to come.”

  Amais hesitated for a moment, and then slowly reached out to take the incense, bowing her head lightly in gratitude. “Do you usually carry spare offerings around with you?” she asked, holding the two sticks like they were something very precious.

  “Often,” Jinlien said, with a tight and enigmatic kind of smile. “For the shrines where no other offering has been made. Or for those who need something to make an offering with… like yourself.”

  Jinlien waited politely, a few steps back, as Amais approached the shrine and lit the incense with a strange awe, half offering the required reverence to a sacred being raised to godhood and residing in Later Heaven, only a step away from the blessed gardens of Cahan itself, and half in a mystified but genuine sense of coming home across the centuries to say hello to a long-lost friend. This had been a living, breathing woman once—Tai’s own jin-shei-bao and the companion of her youth, someone whom Amais almost felt that she had met, immortalized as Nhia had been in Tai’s journals. It was as though this shrine was a vindication, proof that everything that Amais had believed in and dreamed of was true, could be true, should be true…

  And at the same time a reminder of so many things that had not been.

  Amais hadn’t realized that she was quietly crying until Jinlien put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “Come,” she said gently. “I will have some tea brought to us in the gardens. Let us talk of your grandmother.”

  Two

  Weeks turned into months, and months began growing into years.

  The maples were scarlet and gold, shedding leaves like blessings over the heads of the surging crowds thronging the streets around the marketplace and near the Great Temple. The Mid-Autumn Festival had come round again, a time full of poetic significance and mystical augury. In the busy marketplace, a customer would haggle happily over the very last of the festival Mooncakes shaped like animals or Temple pagodas, and then bear them away in triumph even as the stall owner brought out a brand-new tray from underneath the bench, at twice the price, for the next customer in line.

  The skies were clear; the moon would be full and yellow that night, and it would hang in the heavens like a golden coin, pouring a rich shimmering glow over the piled offerings of peaches and pomegranates and those cannily bargained-for mooncakes.

  It should have been perfect. This was supposed to be the end of a fairy tale, the part where the Gods benevolently handed out happiness and contentment and belonging. This was the fairy tale which Amais had gleaned from her many times great-grandmother Tai’s journals—those that she had and treasured, a collection far from complete, fragmented and broken. But there were gaps of lost years even between the individual journals in Amais’s possession, never mind the chasm that yawned after the final one that she owned and the later ones, those that she knew had to have existed given the fact that Tai produced one every year of her life but which Amais had never even seen. She knew of her poet-ancestress’ official biography from second-hand sources, from things she had heard or read from other people, but the real end of Tai’s story—as she herself wrote it— was never to be known, lost, unknowable. Amais almost preferred it that way—she had always been free to supply whatever ending she wished, sometimes simply making it up as she went along. But that had been the fairy tale that she had grown up with, had often taken refuge in when her real life had become too heartbreaking, when things had been too difficult to understand.

  In her childish dreams it had looked like this—almost exactly like this. The ancient walls, the cobbles piled with burnished leaves, the smell of roasted nuts and fresh-baked pastries in the air, the noise of the crowd as it milled around her. Like this… except that in those dreams she had been part of it all, she had worn the same happy excited smile, she had skipped over the leafy cobbles holding some friendly hand of someone… it might even have been Tai herself, in Amais’s young mind… someone whose presence would ensure that she belonged to this time and this place, absolutely, without question.

  This was Linh-an, the city of what had been legend to Amais, the holy ground where the spirits of her ancient ancestors lingered in the narrow alleys and by the massive gates cut into a wall that seemed rooted in time itself.

  But it was far from perfect.

  Even the brightness of the Autumn Festival—something that the government threw to the people of the city like a bone to a starving dog, something good and glowing to play with, to make them forget about their daily lives—had been a veneer, something almost awkward and fake, despite the mooncakes and the vivid autumn maples. For Amais, despite her initial enthusiasm for the Festivals of Linh-an, the whole thing had quickly turned sour. The orderly and dutiful way in which the government trotted out all the ancient festivals in order to keep the populace happy had only served as window-dressing for Amais, a routine, a stage set which promised continuity and safety, shelter against life’s storms. But it had proved to be a false sense of security. Too many things in Amais’s life were uncertain, unpleasant, slipping out of control.

  Those first years in Linh-an had been lonely ones for Amais. An exotic-looking stranger speaking with an unusual outlander accent and wearing shabby clothes was less and less likely to be greeted with a smile and a kind word in the unsettled times of war and conflict; if she was lucky, she would get served in the market without her order being accompanied by a suspicious stare from the shopkeeper—whose shelves were increasingly bare—and half a dozen bystanders who appeared to be taking mental notes on what she bought and where she went. Vien’s invoking of the concept of wangmei and xeimei, the state of being a stranger both of body and of heart, when she had told Elena she was taking her daughters away now began to take on a cruel irony—for Amais could not have been more of a stranger in the city of her ancestors if she tried. She had wandered Linh-an’s streets, taking in the buildings and the people, seeking some trace, somewhere, of the world that had been ruled by jin-shei, the world of the ancient and sacred vow in which Tai had once walked. But there seemed to be little else in the air around her but talk of war, and unspoken fear. People kept to themselves. The thick walls around the city kept out undesirables, and it seemed to Amais that every inhabitant of Linh-an had taken a lesson from their city and raised equally impregnable walls around themselves.

  She had made one friend—a somewhat unexpected one, perhaps, but it had been the one kind face, the one warm voice, that she had found in the whole of Linh-an. Jinlien, the young priestess, had been intrigued by Amais’s invocation of jin-shei, and Amais had returned to the Temple again and again, even after her grandmother’s remains had been suitably bestowed, just for the pleasure of seeing a smile on someone’s face as she approached.

  It was here that Amais came when her mother, apparently oblivious to everything that was going on around her,
had been persuaded to finally exchange what was left of her gold hoard for paper money.

  “It would be the patriotic thing to do,” Vien had been told by her neighbor, the wife of a junior Nationalist officer, who had ferreted out the existence of the gold from Vien in an unguarded moment. “Our men fight for us. They are often not paid at all, for months—I would know, wouldn’t I? And you—you’ve lived here long enough to see—my own children go hungry sometimes. All gold belongs rightfully to the government, they can use it to settle debts, pay their armies, make sure we can sleep safe at night. It is not right to have treasure and keep it to yourself.”